GET SMARTHOUSE SAVVY

Sur­vey­ing the lat­est in de­sign­tech trends with Sam­sung.

Houses should be ma­chines for liv­ing, wrote Le Cor­bus­ier 90-odd years ago. The French de­signer might have been re­fer­ring to the su­per­flu­os­ity of elab­o­rate styles then in vogue, but his words had pre­science: to­day, tech­nol­ogy ex­ists at the heart of the home, in in­creas­ingly seam­less ways.

The art of in­te­gra­tion

You don't have to make a con­scious ef­fort to in­te­grate tech­nol­ogy into your life: de­vices, cars and even ap­pli­ances are al­ready do­ing it for you. And the more so­phis­ti­cated tech­nol­ogy gets, the eas­ier it is to use.

Seam­less style

Not seen and def­i­nitely not heard, au­to­mated de­tails can be neatly in­te­grated into home de­sign. The best new tech­nol­ogy is un­seen, sit­ting dis­creetly be­hind pan­els and cab­i­netry.

Keep­ing it green

The cost of gen­er­at­ing your own power has dropped sig­nif­i­cantly in re­cent years. Sys­tems have be­come more re­li­able with ad­vances in bat­tery stor­age, while hyper-ef­fi­cient ap­pli­ances draw less power. Green walls, plant­ing and pas­sive heat­ing, on the other hand, might seem sim­ple but are about as en­vi­ron­men­tally smart as it gets.

The in­ter­net of things

Whereas you once needed mul­ti­ple re­motes and a com­puter-sci­ence de­gree to drive de­vices, all you need now is a smart­phone. Ad­vances in au­to­ma­tion, mean­while, mean touch­screens and apps are avail­able on all man­ner of de­vices that didn't pre­vi­ously con­nect to the world-wide web.

Se­cu­rity smart

Con­tem­po­rary se­cu­rity is less about mak­ing your house a fortress and more about mak­ing it smart and ef­fi­cient. Key­pad en­try, for ex­am­ple, does away with the need for keys, while apps al­low you to keep an eye on your home, wher­ever you are in the world.